The Worst Thing About “Birth of a Nation” Is How Good It Is

The release of “Django Unchained,” and the discussion surrounding it, have brought “Birth of a Nation”—D. W. Griffith’s disgustingly racist yet titanically original 1915 feature—back to the fore. The movie, set mainly in a South Carolina town before and after the Civil War, depicts slavery in a halcyon light, presents blacks as good for little but subservient labor, and shows them, during Reconstruction, to have been goaded by the Radical Republicans into asserting an abusive dominion over Southern whites. It depicts freedmen as interested, above all, in intermarriage, indulging in legally sanctioned excess and vengeful violence mainly to coerce white women into sexual relations. It shows Southern whites forming the Ku Klux Klan to defend themselves against such abominations and to spur the “Aryan” cause overall. The movie asserts that the white-sheet-clad death squad served justice summarily and that, by denying blacks the right to vote and keeping them generally apart and subordinate, it restored order and civilization to the South.

“Birth of a Nation,” which runs more than three hours, was sold as a sensation and became one; it was shown at gala screenings, with expensive tickets. It was also the subject of protest by civil-rights organizations and critiques by clergymen and editorialists, and for good reason: “Birth of a Nation” proved horrifically effective at sparking violence against blacks in many cities. Given these circumstances, it’s hard to understand why Griffith’s film merits anything but a place in the dustbin of history, as an abomination worthy solely of autopsy in the study of social and aesthetic pathology.

Problematically, “Birth of a Nation” wasn’t just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art—in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality. It’s tempting to think of the film’s influence as evidence of the inherent corruption of realism as a cinematic mode—but it’s even more revealing to acknowledge the disjunction between its beauty, on the one hand, and, on the other, its injustice and falsehood. The movie’s fabricated events shouldn’t lead any viewer to deny the historical facts of slavery and Reconstruction. But they also shouldn’t lead to a denial of the peculiar, disturbingly exalted beauty of “Birth of a Nation,” even in its depiction of immoral actions and its realization of blatant propaganda.

The worst thing about “Birth of a Nation” is how good it is. The merits of its grand and enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore and, despite its disgusting content, also make it hard not to love. And it’s that very conflict that renders the film all the more despicable, the experience of the film more of a torment—together with the acknowledgment that Griffith, whose short films for Biograph were already among the treasures of world cinema, yoked his mighty talent to the cause of hatred (which, still worse, he sincerely depicted as virtuous).

Griffith’s art offers humanly profound moments, whether graceful and delicate or grand and rhetorical, that detach themselves from their context to probe nearly universal circumstances, such as the blend of shame and pride in the face of a returning Confederate soldier when he comes home in tatters and finds his sister in tatters as well, or the stalwart antics of a Union girl (Lillian Gish) as she sends her brothers off to war before collapsing in tears when they’re just out of view. The breathtaking shot that starts close to a huddling mother and children, high on a hillside, and then moves to the advance of Sherman’s army, seen from the family’s elevated refuge, poignantly depicts the intimate ravages of war. The shot of a former slave-owner, under siege by a posse of freedmen for his son’s membership in the K.K.K., holding his grown daughter by the hair and raising his pistol above her head—he’s preparing to kill her if the blacks breach the door—has a harrowing and exalted grandeur that surpasses the film’s specific prejudices to achieve a classical moment of tragedy. The cavalry charges of the K.K.K., done with moving cameras that hurtle backward at the speed of the gallop, are visually exhilarating and viscerally thrilling, despite the hateful and bloodthirsty repression that they represent; it’s the kinetic model for a century of action scenes.

Throughout the film, Griffith’s pro-Confederacy feelings are grossly apparent; yet his depiction of events—his representation of reality as he understands it—involves the inclusion of much that departs from his intentions. The very essence of his realism is open frames, complex stagings, and multiple planes of action, all of which suggest far more than Griffith’s descriptive title cards, and his stunted politics, would themselves allow.

For instance, a scene of slave-owners and their Northern guests amiably passing by cotton fields while slaves toil in the background presents, as if in a documentary, the obvious connection between the white Southerners’ gracious ways and the hard, enforced work of slaves that makes it possible. This was not Griffith’s intention, but it’s the effect. He shows a summary trial by the K.K.K. of a black man whose sexual advances toward a white woman induced her to leap to her death. That trial and the delivery of the victim’s corpse to the doorstep of the mixed-race lieutenant governor are meant to seem just, even heroic, but come off as obscene and horrifying. The splendid festivities to celebrate the Battle of Bull Run, intercut with the eerie flare of a bonfire, suggest a dance of death, the bonfire foreshadowing the burning of Atlanta. Despite Griffith’s beliefs, the arrival of the Klan, pointing rifles at unarmed blacks who merely seek to vote, appears unjust and cruel.

The overall subject of the film is the original sin of the proximity of the white and black races. The opening scene, in which Africans are brought to the United States and sold as slaves, is described in a title card: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” The problem, from the movie’s start, wasn’t slavery but the undue mixing of races—and Griffith’s original ending was to show the return of freedmen to Africa. The two great villains of the film are both described as “mulattos”: the licentious, social-climbing housekeeper of a Radical Republican congressman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, down to the bad toupee), who takes advantage of the widower’s so-called “weakness,” leading to his divisive, aggressive, vengefully carpetbagging version of Reconstruction; and the conniving, contemptuous politician whom the congressman imposes as South Carolina’s lieutenant governor. The crisis that sparks the revolt of Southern whites is the blacks’ claim (asserted with a hungry leering) to the right of intermarriage. The very notion of racial purity (or what one title card calls the “Aryan birthright”) is at the core of the film. Yet the essence of the movie’s aesthetic power—and of its enduring significance—is its intrinsic heterogeneity.

The movie’s perspective on the events of the plot is rich, broad, and deep enough to provide the material for its own contradiction. That’s the very definition of Griffith’s realism, the founding of a cinematic manner that flourishes to this very day, in a wide range of varieties and refractions, and that reflects filmmakers’ confidence that filmic representations, however artificial or contrived, make direct contact with the world of their experience. Griffith doesn’t hide behind interpretive ambiguities or assume that the facts speak for themselves; he makes a world after his own mind, stoking the events vigorously and skewing them decisively with the equivalent of a first-person voice (as in the title cards, adorned with his signature, throughout). He filmed a world that was made to embody his point of view—but the detail and scope that he considered necessary to simulate the reality of that vanished world was inherently multitudinous and polysemic. (And the scenes that aren’t—such as those, in the state legislature, depicting black legislators as leering slobs—are ridiculous and cartoonish.) The one-word definition of Griffith’s realism—and of the best of the generations of movie realism that followed in its wake—is “more.” Despite his best (or, rather, worst) efforts, his movie escaped him.

What “Birth of a Nation” offers, even more than a vision of history, is a template for the vast, world-embracing capabilities of the cinema. It provided extraordinarily powerful tools for its own refutation. The real crime was not Griffith’s, but the world’s: the fact that most viewers knew little about slavery and little about Reconstruction and little about Jim Crow and little about the Klan, and were all too ready to swallow the very worst of the movie without question. They saw only what Griffith wanted to say but not what the movie showed, and, upon seeing what Griffith showed, were ready to take up arms in anger. Ambient and accepted racism left viewers ignorant of the facts and prone to accept Griffith’s racist version as authentic—and denied other filmmakers the chance to appropriate and even to advance Griffith’s methods and make movies offering historically faithful accounts of the same periods and events.

It took another twelve years for sync sound to come into wide use, with “The Jazz Singer.” Why was there no movie documentary in which former slaves bore witness to their experience—no cinematic equivalent of the interviews in “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project,” which were done in the mid-thirties? Griffith’s work could have given rise to a resounding cinematic response, anticipating the mode of “Shoah,” regarding slavery. It could have been the basis for visits by former slaves or their descendants to the sites of their sufferings. It could have provoked a full and classic drama about the agonies of slaves in the prewar South, and the full measure of horrific exactions by the Klan and the decades of Jim Crow. Such films weren’t made—couldn’t be made—because those who produced films didn’t allow them to be made—and because whites in the South would certainly not have let them be made.

Yet directors who looked more clearly at the history and the modern circumstances of blacks in America (starting with Oscar Micheaux, in the silent era) have done so, however paradoxically and however infuriatingly, on the basis of Griffith’s cinematic vision, which was far more enduring and more significant than his benighted historical vision. The legacy of Griffith is simultaneously that of the medium’s colossal artistic force and its power for demagogy—of the potential to bring a world to life onscreen and the potential to turn that world into the big lie, whether with sincere or cynical intentions.

Tarantino claims to have made “Django Unchained” as something of a response to “Birth of a Nation.” His depiction of the brutality and the horror of slavery is meant as a belated corrective to Griffith’s falsified record. Yet Tarantino offers nothing of Griffith’s polysemy, nothing of his sense of being in the actual presence of history; the cartoonishness of Griffith’s worst scenes is “Django”’s basic mode. Tarantino, in his cinema-centric skein of references, suggests precisely the lack of confidence that he’s filming anything like actual experience—even though the ardent righteousness of the movie’s emotional affect suggests that he’s filming something close to his thoughts and feelings. Tarantino has spoken of his awareness of filming on actual historical sites where slaves lived, yet nowhere in the film is there the frame-breaking gesture that suggests a recognition of his own presence in the history that he appropriates. Tarantino has distinguished between the kind of violence that “can be fun” and the kind that’s “hard to take” (and that he takes seriously)—yet “Django Unchained” often blurs the distinction between the two, suggesting mainly that the director gets off on filming violence to any end whatsoever.

As for the fantasies of vengeance that he offers, there may yet have been no K.K.K. in the antebellum South that Tarantino depicts (he calls his bag-headed marauders the “Regulators”), but the violence by blacks against whites in which Tarantino exults is the obverse of Griffith’s retrospective paranoia. It wouldn’t be a stretch to dissolve from the flames of Tarantino’s Candieland to Griffith’s Confederate veteran, on a hillside, giving birth to the idea of the hooded Klan, or to cut from a title card with Django’s famous line (“Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?”) to one of Griffith’s scenes of Klansmen suiting up for action. Despite Tarantino’s virtuous intentions and sympathies, his crude and childish view of revenge renders them as regressive as Griffith’s own.

P.S. “Birth of a Nation” isn’t the only work of repugnant propaganda that suggests a cinematic subconscious far more expansive than its director’s intentions. I’ve written here and here about “Jew Süss,” an anti-Semitic propaganda drama made in Germany in 1940. Its director, Veit Harlan, is nowhere near an artist of Griffith’s originality or aesthetic sense, but he is enough of a director to have made a similarly effective work of propaganda on the basis of its amplitude. It’s no stretch to see beyond the prejudices to the elements in the film that contradict its obvious intentions.

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